Fish Out of Water

WRITTEN BY Kailey Anderson

The day initially felt routine. It was sunset and about to start snowing in New York, the first big snow of the year. The temperature had dropped significantly in just a few hours since I first stepped outside, and my lighter trench coat was not helping me stay warm at all. I had come into Manhattan to meet a friend for a work session, and when we were finished, we headed to do some grocery shopping. A very typical Monday, with typical catch ups, and the same work to be done. In the midst of discussing the agenda for the upcoming week, my friend turned to me and asked, “What do you feel like you actually learned from getting your degree?” I froze. My mind went blank. She went on to explain that with her time at university coming to a close, she had been curious about the “other side” of higher education – what it felt to use a degree’s worth of knowledge in the real world. I hadn’t consciously processed anything I had learned in the first months of the New Year, nevermind the four years I spent getting a fine arts degree. I told her I needed to think about it. How could I respond to the question, giving her the comfort and solace that she was looking for, without absolutely floundering? 

I parted ways with my friend, groceries in tow and walking through the beginning flurries of the evening. Yet I could not stop thinking about the question. A memory of David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water” 2005 commencement speech rang through my mind, where he recounts a short parable: An older fish asking two younger fish, “how’s the water?” To which they reply, “what the hell is water?”

Of course, David Foster Wallace’s critique of consciousness is in a school of thought far above my own. But that one question had pulled me out of the water and I was gasping. The pattern that I had fallen into, Wallace strongly advised against. I consciously disliked it – I wasn’t being challenged, I didn’t feel as though I was expanding as a human being, and was the furthest from my creative life I had been in nearly half a decade.  

My fine arts education, while balanced, was all-engulfing. I attended 9-to-5 classes three days a week, studying method acting, voice, and movement. The other two days, I was writing papers about entertainment and media industries, case studies about cable television, and learning the history of media moguls. And when I wasn’t in class, I was producing in an off-campus job and acting in short films on weekends. However, the day of graduation, I turned to my parents in tears, simply stating: “I feel like I know nothing.”

I got home and asked myself the question again. Everything I had learned had become so integrated into my being that I cannot remember a time where I didn’t have the perspective I have now – which, in a way, is part of earning a college degree. But, getting swept away in all that I know turns what is meant to be expansive into a bubble. It is what turns people into machines, what divides countries, and traps the human psyche on a hamster wheel of “I think, therefore I am.” 

I first read Wallace’s commencement speech in my senior year of high school. I remember feeling inspired by it, but definitely could not grasp what he was trying to get me to see. Looking back, my 18-year-old self is an entirely different person: only capable of seeing what was immediate and within a small radius of space and time. This was eventually my response to my friend: college helped me grow into the person I needed to be above all else. Instead of university being the teacher, I am finding some answers now in the words of friends, in supermarkets, and in snowy days to questions I am not fully conscious of.